“mainstream media” on The Daily Caller

After a bruising primary season, the GOP establishment is trying to come to terms with a Tea Party movement that enjoys the loyalty of thousands of activists across the country.  Tales of infighting are already starting to circulate.  But while the moderate and conservative wings of the Republican Party are sniping at each other, they can at least agree on something: the mainstream media remains overwhelmingly biased in favor of the Democratic Party and President Barack Obama. (more)

Last week, President Obama flew to Ohio to provide the country with more partisan rhetoric, but this time the president had one thing in mind — well, actually two things.  The first was to provide a verbal shot in the arm of that old nugget of a political wedge: class warfare.  The second was to portray the Republican Minority Leader, John Boehner, as the personification of all that is bad with the country, despite the fact that the president and his party have been running the show for almost two years and most Americans have never even heard of Boehner. (more)

On Sunday, for the second year in a row, former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks organization hosted a 9/12 March on Washington in Washington, D.C. The focus of this year’s political rally was on the Contract From America, a plan FreedomWorks has been asking politicians to sign and pledge to follow. The Contract is aimed at reducing spending and government involvement in people’s lives. (more)

Now that I am back on dry land, I am able to write about something that has been on my mind since last week, after watching a disaster of a TV show, a.k.a. The Charlie Rose Show.  The remote control was indeed working overtime late Thursday night in all of the seamless channel transitions between Letterman and Charlie Rose.  For last Thursday night I was on a quest: a quest to find TV comedy even if that meant finding it on the most unconventional of channels, PBS.   And wow, I sure struck gold Thursday night between CBS and PBS.  The ”last channel” button on the remote is truly a fascinating feature to me … forget the damn remote, just give me the ”last channel” button … but that wouldn’t be very practical now would it? (more)

The so-called “mainstream media” has spent the past week trying to determine how anywhere from one-fifth to one-quarter of the American people could conclude that President Obama is a Muslim.  The commentary has almost universally condemned Americans as “ignorant,” “ill-informed,” “racist,” or “bigoted,” asserting disdainfully that it’s “obvious” that Obama is a Christian. (more)

Coolidge did it, so did Truman, as did Johnson, and to some extent, Nixon sort of did it (“You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore,” Nixon said after losing a California gubernatorial bid in 1962, though he went on to be elected in near landslides in 1968 and 1972): quit politics. (more)

The emergence of the Journolist listserv at The Daily Caller has created quite a stir on the Internet, but among mainstream media journalists, the silence is deafening. The listserv creates the impression that the entire profession of journalism protected presidential candidate Barack Obama in the spring of 2008, when controversy over his attendance at the church of Jeremiah Wright reached its zenith, and ever since. (more)

Few now doubt that the Tea Party is composed of a unique group of individuals.  Their protests occasionally surf the lunatic fringe (spitting on members of Congress, screaming misogynistic epitaphs) none of which are defensible or excusable actions.  Recently, the overall effectiveness of the Tea Party movement is being called into question with regard to the long-term strategy of the Republican Party. (more)

Journalists love whistleblowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them. Journalists love transparency. As long as they’re not the ones being exposed. (more)

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign. (more)

Some of the most conservative and combative Republicans running for Congress are convinced that the media have it in for them. (more)

According to a Zogby survey (buried by the mainstream media as an irrelevant news item), self-identified Democrats and Progressives score badly on a simple test of economic understanding. This, according to the May issue of Econ Journal Watch (which I read only because it was the swimsuit issue), was no surprise to the cognitive few remaining among us. (more)

Self-interest and humanitarianism (more)

The conservatives’ war with David Frum is once again in the news (or at least the blogosphere). The latest skirmish involves John Hawkins, who has taken to his blog at Right Wing News to explain why he excluded Frum’s website, FrumForum, from Blogads Conservative Hive. Hawkins insists that neither Frum nor his website is conservative. (more)

On Friday, we found out that House and Senate conferees closed a marathon session with an early-morning announcement that a deal had been reached on the Dodd-Frank Financial Overhaul bill. The mainstream media, of course, breathlessly applauded Congress for making this deal and “fixing” our financial woes. (more)

Of the many interesting narratives swirling around the Obama/McChrystal saga, the least explored to date— less than 24 hours in—the subtleties in messaging are worth noting. (more)

There are now more than 83,000 people in the U.S. on the waiting list for a kidney. Yet with less than 17,000 transplants done each year, more than 40 percent will die waiting. As bad, transplants are most likely to succeed when they are done early. So as the waiting time increases (now about 5 years), even those lucky enough to get a new kidney do not benefit as much as possible. (more)

Pssst. Want to know the big secret about fathers this Father’s Day? (more)

To the usual journalistic armoury (famously, ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability), Wang Keqin has added an extra element: the small, red-smudged, battered metal tin that he carries to each interview. (more)

During the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, FEMA Administrator Michael “Brownie” Brown got a lot of flak from the mainstream media for, well…everything. Some of it was deserved and some of it was little more than mendacious piling-on, but all of it was intense and it lead to Michael Brown’s resignation from FEMA mid-Katrina response. The media is extremely powerful in this country, and what the press coverage of the latest disaster to hit the United States—the BP oil spill—proves is that the media wields this power very selectively. (more)